The APC Tumor Suppressor Pathway
互联网
472
Colon cancer is the second most common cause of cancer mortality among adults in the United States today (1 ). Colon cancer arises from a pathological transformation of the normal colonic epithelium to an adenomatous polyp, which can then progress to an invasive tumor. This progression is brought about by a number of genetic changes, which include the inactivation of tumor suppressor genes and activation of protooncogenes, the net result of which is to confer a proliferative advantage to the cancerous cell (2 ,3 ). These changes are best described in the colon cancer adenoma-carcinoma sequence model as outlined in Fig. 1 (4 ).
